AND IT'S PRETTY UNSETTLING....

Hydrophone being lowered into the Mariana Trench. (NOAA)

Recently, the NOAA released the surprising and somewhat frightening sounds that permeate in the deepest parts of the ocean. The team had thought that when they sent a titanium encased hydrophone that they would be greeted with silence but instead they found man made and natural sounds.

Capturing the sounds was no easy feat. Because the Mariana Trench is up to 11,000m deep, it is incredibly difficult to explore due to the immense pressure place on objects at that depth. It is in fact to be 16,000 pounds per square inch.

They had never been able to get a hydrophone deeper than a mile but this time they got it 7 miles down. Of course, it took three weeks to reach that depth because they could drop the microphone no more than 5 meters per second to avoid crushing the ceramic housing.

In this TedTalk, Cave explorer and geologist, Franscesco Sauro, travels to the darkest places in our planet to discover new minerals and insects that evolved on their own in isolation. He is using this knowledge to train astronauts about the possibilities of what they may find on alien worlds.

New research has found a large terrestrial carbon sink in a desert aquifer under the Tarim Basin in China. Carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere by the production, burning or use of fossil fuels. Humans make lots of carbon dioxide every single day. It was previously assumed that carbon dioxide that was not absorbed by plants ended up hanging around in the atmosphere or in the ocean. Research conducted by Dr Yan Li from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography has found that in arid environments, carbon dioxide absorbed by irrigated crops finds its way into irrigation water, and seeps deep into the earth to rest in aquifers underground. These new findings could begin to explain some unknowns to the scientific community about the global carbon balance.

In this BBC Earth article by Leslie Ogden, dentist and narwhal enthusiast Martin Nweeia explores some myths and facts about Narwhals. Among common misconceptions are the rumors that narwhals spear their food with their tusk-horns, that they are aggressive toward prey and people, and that they use their large horns to fight each other. In fact, according to this BBC article, many people think that narwhals are mythical creatures that do not even exist. None of these are true. Narwhals exist, they are very shy, and they eat small prey that would be very hard to spear with their tusks, let alone to remove for consumption. Nweeia has spent 10 years studying narwhals out of curiosity about their tusks. It is still unclear what the exact purpose of the narwhal horn is, although researchers speculate heavily that, since the horns are largely found on male narwhals, they are used to attract mates. Studies have also found that the horns, fleshy on the outside and hard on the inside, could be used as a sort of perceptive organ to get a feel for the waters the narwhal is traveling into.